Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction
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| Flames, are expected to be a priori heirs of a patriarchal genealogy. They challenge this through their subversive performance of masculinity. Affected by childhood abuse and problematic father figures, the sons realise that masculinity and its biological signifiers can be exploited to experience and legitimise alternative senses of identities that displace father figures and the identitarian legitimacy they represent and embody. By (mis)performing masculinity through adornment, painting and transvestism, they consume transsexuality and therefore provide an androgynous sense of identity. In this way sonhood is endowed with a critique of patriarchal configurations and frameworks of identification. Sonhood, as portrayed in these works proffers, in the words of Stephen Frosh (1994) a view from elsewhere with regards to sexual difference and the constructed notions of masculinity and femininity. Both sons and daughters therefore multiply the distinctions of identity, by destabilising the authority inscribed in the framework of patriarchy. The micro-relationships portrayed in the varied family settings become grounds fora micro-politics of resistance, parody, foregrounding illegitimacy and therefore empowering childhood within borrowing the words of Linda Hutcheon (1988) a poetics of postmodernism The challenge and complication of genealogies, provides alternative senses of identity for the protagonists in Adichie‟s and Abani‟s works. Kambili for instance breaks out of the psycho-physical oppression of her father by embracing what her father proscribes, her grandfather Papa Nnukwu‟s worldview. She re-inscribes a patriarchal genealogy, albeit by exploiting the liberating topography of her aunt Ifeoma‟s house at University of Nigeria Nsukka. 310 However, at the end of Purple Hibiscus, Adichie‟s vision of foregrounding a maternal genealogy is clear Kambili‟s father is dead, killed by his own erstwhile submissive and problematically conformist wife, Kambili‟s brother Jaja is in jail vicariously suffering the would-be-fate of his mother, and Father Amadi the young and progressive Catholic priest is whisked off to Germany on a Christian mission. Adichie systematically eliminates all the men but leaves the clear impression that the new and liberating silence at the end of the novel draws from both paternal and maternal genealogies of Kambili. Moreover, Jaja‟s sacrificial incarceration at the end of the text draws similarities with Achebe‟s ending in Arrow of God, with Obika‟s death as a sacrificial gesture for the Ezeulu family and indeed with the coming of Christianity which embodies the power of sacrificial love and functions here is a metonym. The sons, in Abani‟s works inscribe their own legitimacy and authority and therefore provide alternative and androgynous genealogies by their experience of the multicultural and transcultural cityscapes of Lagos and Los Angeles. They also destabilise a prior nature of their inheritance as heirs of patriarchal genealogies by the spaces for freedom that the city creates for them. For them, masculinity is a site where they subvert heteronormativity, masculine senses of genealogy and identity, while providing alternative forms of identity. Therefore, sons and daughters provide anew legitimacy to the discourse of childhood in relation to the notion of genealogies. Sonhood and daughterhood in this way multiply the distinctions and margins of identity-making, while destabilising patriarchal genealogies. The discourse of childhood, explored through the specific notions of sonhood and daughterhood, uncovers for us the micro-politics of identity formation in the intimate and filial familial relations that inform ways of identification for the child figure. Childhood therefore claims a stake in the macro- identity discourse of genealogies, through an anti-foundational poetics – creating alternative spaces to perform masculinities, in the case of Abani‟s protagonists, and to exploit sentiment, in Adichie‟s and Atta‟s protagonists. This world of childhood is empowered, in the case of the sons, by multicultural and transcultural cityscapes, where simulacrum extends spaces of performing identity and where forms of mass media destabilise the authority and legitimacy of monolithic ways of identification. 311 The notion of genealogies in the discourse of childhood is made complex, by the transcontinental childhoods portrayed in Oyeyemi‟s works. Ways of identification are complicated by myths and legends related to the genealogies of a black Atlantic diaspora. This new experience of childhood pushes the boundaries of childhood discourse to newer levels. Childhood becomes a multinational, transnational and multi-continental literary discourse. In this case, we talk about “diasporic childhoods Here, Africa and specifically Nigeria, become part of a larger diaspora space, with networks that cut across different continents and go back to the annals of black Atlantic history. Representing this kind of childhood as Oyeyemi does, means collapsing the gulfs of space and time, and therefore having to construct childhood as a site for the strategic and simultaneous. Oyeyemi exploits the experimental character of childhood, by using mythopoetic narrative structures, which connect myths and legends from various continents in the construction of diasporic childhoods. This is the apotheosis of the notion of mobility – of myths, legends and cultures across continental boundaries, therefore portraying childhood as a space for consuming diasporic subjectivity and constructing postmodern identities. Childhood becomes a space for “transruption,” borrowing the word coined by Barnor Hesse (2000). Hesse uses the term to refer to the entanglements of diaspora as unsettled multiculturalisms,” defined by discontinuities and disjunctures of history, time, space and place. This indeed is the nature of the childhoods) portrayed in Oyeyemi‟s works it is a site for the entanglement of the transcultural and multicultural via a (dis)junctural and discontinuous sense of spatio-temporality. In this way, childhood is transruptive. The notion of childhood in Oyeyemi‟s works is caught in the centre of a practico-sensory experience of Europe and a mythic and ideational experience and consciousness of Africa. These childhoods are highly imaginative, and caught in the struggle between an African genealogy and a European or Caribbean birth. In this way, for instance, Jess in Download 1.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
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